It’s not hard to see why the Clintons’ might be feeling the Kaine: The former governor of Virginia and current member of the Senate Armed Services Committee boasts
both executive and foreign-policy experience, speaks fluent Spanish, has ties to a swing state, and is a known quantity, having been vetted by Democratic nominees in cycles past. In a race where most pol ls show Clinton with a solid lead, picking a moderate, experienced white man makes some tacticalsense.
Still, Kaine has his drawbacks. His selection would prompt a 2017 special election to replace his seat. With Democrats consistently failing to turn out in off years, that could hand the GOP a precious vote in the upper chamber.
But the senator’s greatest liability may be his relationship to the party’s grassroots left. Kaine has alienated advocates for reproductive choice by
promoting abstinence-focused education and laws making parental consent a prerequisite for abortion access. He’s frustrated
environmentalists by supporting offshore drilling in the Atlantic and expanding construction of natural-gas terminals (that said, the rest of his environmental record is fairly strong and includes opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline and support for the Clean Power Plan). And he bucked the will of most Senate Democrats — including progressive leaders Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — by voting to give the White House fast-track authority to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership. (The senator has not taken an official position on the final draft of thedeal).*
This week, Kaine provided left Democrats with two fresh reasons to see his selection as a repudiation of their agenda. On Monday, the senator added his name to two letters urging the federal government to scale back regulations on community and regional banks.
In
a letter co-signed by 15 other Senate Democrats — and
every Senate Republican — Kaine asked the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to exempt community banks and credit unions from many of its regulatory requirements. In justifying these exemptions, the letter suggests that these regulations would make it more difficult for these small banks to continue “spurring economic growth” and that such rules are unnecessary, anyhow, since community banks “were not the primary cause of the financial crisis.”
This latter point is a bit of non sequitur. Just because a reckless activity was not the “primary cause” of the last global economic crisis doesn’t mean that activity isn’t worth preventing. According to the
Intercept’s David Dayen,the rule
Kaine proposes “could allow community banks and credit unions to sell high-risk mortgages or personal loans without the disclosure and ability to pay rules in place across the industry.” Such bad loans may not take down our financial system, but they could ruin the lives of the families that receive them.
In a
second letter to the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Kaine and his co-signers argue that large regional banks like PNC, BB&T, and SunTrust should be exempt from two regulations meant to reduce their risk of collapse.
THE INTERCEPT HP
While Kaine stepped up to the plate for banking interests this week, he simultaneously snubbed consumer-advocacy groups. On Wednesday, Kaine was one of 13 Democratic senators to withhold his signature from a letter authored by Sherrod Brown, which called for strengthening new rules against abusive payday lenders. The senator’s office told the Huffington Post that he is “working on his own separate ‘Virginia-focused’” letter on payday lending.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/07/clinton-vp-favorite-pushes-for-bank-deregulation.html